In China and elsewhere, there is increasingly intense speculation as to why Zhou Xiaochuan, the highly acclaimed governor of the People’s Bank of China, has for months been silent about the renminbi, the ailing Chinese currency. His silence and absence is most unusual and apparently prompted IMF Managing Director Christine Lagarde to chide Beijing at Davos last month for the government’s inadequate communication with financial markets.

Zhou, notably, stayed away from the central bank’s August 13 press conference, held just two days after the shock devaluation of the yuan, as the Chinese currency is informally known. Though he appeared at a G-20 finance meeting in Ankara in early September, he has since vanished. That he skipped Davos, raised eyebrows.

Chinese President Xi Jinping just wrapped up his three-nation tour to the Middle East with a visit to Iran.

The global narrative is that Beijing and Tehran are strengthening relations and for good reason: during the visit the two sides inked 17 accords, treaties, and letters of intent.

The two republics—one “People’s” and the other “Islamic”—also declared they had agreed, in the words of the official Xinhua News Agency, “to elevate their ties to a comprehensive strategic partnership.” And they appear to have meant it. As Xi’s Iranian counterpart Hassan Rouhani said on Saturday, “Today we discussed the strategic relationship between both countries, setting up a comprehensive 25-year plan and also promoting bilateral relations of up to $600 billion over the next 10 years.”

Stocks around the world have generally tumbled this month, but last Tuesday was a bright spot as equity markets surged. Then, Beijing's National Bureau of Statistics reported its first estimate of China's gross domestic product for 2015.

The official agency pegged last year's growth at 6.9 percent. The percentage increase, roughly in line with analyst expectations, was the lowest in 25 years.

So why does a dour report trigger optimism among stock investors? Investors now believe the Chinese central government will step up stimulus to restart growth, which has been falling since 2011. Furthermore, there is a hope that state entities and government-backed funds in China—the so-called “National Team”—will begin a new round of buying in China’s two share markets. Both developments are considered good for Chinese stocks.

And what is good for stocks in China is often thought to be good for stocks everywhere else.

On Monday, a “US official” speaking anonymously to Reuters, said the Pentagon was not thinking of reintroducing nuclear weapons to the Korean peninsula.

Earlier in the day, Seoul had suggested Washington was considering the possibility. “The United States and South Korea are continuously and closely having discussions on additional deployment of strategic assets,” South Korean Defense Ministry spokesman Kim Min-seok said.

By “strategic assets” the unnamed US official said the Defense Department was referring to nuclear-capable bombers. South Korean media had been reporting that Washington and Seoul were discussing the deployment of American B-2 bombers, F-22 fighters, and nuclear submarines to the Korean peninsula.

President George H. W. Bush in 1991 announced the unilateral withdrawal of tactical nuclear weapons from South Korea and other foreign countries, and today there is virtually no apparent support in the Pentagon for redeploying them.

The case of five missing Hong Kong residents connected to a Hong Kong publisher and bookshop took a strange turn Monday when the wife of one of the missing individuals withdrew her request for police assistance. Choi Ka Ping said she had heard from her husband that day and no longer needed help.

The police, however, said they would continue the investigation into the disappearance of the husband, Lee Bo.

The first to disappear was Gui Minhai, owner of Mighty Current, a publishing house that since 2012 has released about 80 books highly critical of China’s Communist Party. The last known contact from him was an e-mail message sent on October 15 to a printer from the Thai resort of Pattaya.

On Monday, Japan and South Korea, in parallel statements of their foreign ministers, agreed to a “final and irreversible” settlement of the so-called “comfort women” issue.

During Japan’s colonization of Korea last century, Korean females had been forced to provide sexual services to Japanese soldiers in military-run brothels.

Pursuant to the deal, Tokyo agreed to pay 1 billion yen ($8.3 million) into a South Korean fund for the 46 surviving comfort women. More important, Japan’s foreign minister, while in Seoul, delivered the apology of his country’s prime minister. Fumio Kishida said Shinzo Abe “expresses anew his most sincere apologies and remorse to all the women who underwent immeasurable and painful experiences and suffered incurable physical and psychological wounds as comfort women.”

On November 25th the Royal Australian Air Force conducted a “routine maritime patrol” in the South China Sea as a part of Operation Gateway, a program of periodic flights. An AP-3C Orion surveillance plane flew near a reclaimed Chinese feature in the Spratly island chain, in the sea’s southern portion.

In response, the Global Times, a Beijing-based Communist Party newspaper, published an editorial that essentially threatened to start a war: “It would be a shame if one day a plane fell from the sky and it happened to be Australian.”

Australian Defense Minister Marise Payne responded to Beijing’s bluster with remarks that left something to be desired. “We always navigate in a very constructive way in the region,” she said.

On Monday, unidentified men, many of them wearing smiley-face stickers on their jackets, shoved journalists so that they fell onto American diplomat Dan Biers as he was reading a statement in Beijing about the persecution of Chinese human rights lawyer Pu Zhiqiang. Biers, a deputy political counselor at the US Embassy, had to stop reading but was later able to finish.

The incident took place while Biers was standing outside Beijing No. 2 Intermediate People’s Court, where Pu’s trial is being held.

The men, almost certainly from Beijing’s Public Security Bureau or a similar unit, also interrupted a European Union delegate. Diplomats from 10 countries other than the US were on hand for the proceeding—“the capital’s biggest political trial in two years,” according to the Wall Street Journal’s “China Real Time Report”—and many of them were also harassed.

Monday afternoon, the Beijing municipality issued its first-ever red alert for air pollution. The warning, the highest in a four-level system, expires at noon on Thursday.

During this alert, primary and secondary schools are closed, as are kindergartens. Individual cars are only allowed on the road on alternate days. Government offices must reduce car use by 30 percent. Public transportation operates on extended schedules. Heavy trucks must stay off the roads. All outdoor construction is stopped. Factories are required to close for two days. Fireworks and barbecues are banned.

The air in Beijing is now a dark gray. And it is deadly. PM2.5 readings, which measure the most hazardous particulates, exceeded 900 in recent days. The World Health Organization’s safe level is 25. In China, some 4,000 people a day die from bad air, according to one study.

At the end of October, North Korea’s official Korean Central News Agency announced that the ruling Workers’ Party will hold its next congress in May 2016. The congress last met 35 years ago, in October 1980, during the reign of Kim Jong Un’s grandfather, Kim Il Sung.

KCNA, with typical grandeur, announced that the meeting reflected “the demand of the party and the developing revolution that witness epoch-making changes in accomplishing the revolutionary cause of Juche, the cause of building a thriving socialist nation.”

There is no indication of what will be on the agenda, and Korea analysts know they will learn about that only when the congress finally meets. After a month of consideration, however, they have reached a basic consensus about what the holding of the congress means: that the party has consolidated power at the expense of the Korean People’s Army, and that Kim Jong Un, the country’s youngish ruler, has taken full political control of the regime.

“To my Chinese counterparts, I would remind them, increasingly you are as vulnerable as any other major industrialized nation state,” said Admiral Mike Rogers, director of the National Security Agency and the chief of US Cyber Command, on November 21st at the Halifax Security Forum. “The idea you can somehow exist outside the broader global cyber challenges I don’t think is workable.”

That, in all probability, was not an observation. A year ago, it was inconceivable that an American four-star officer would talk like this—in other words, make a threat—in public.

The temperature over cyber matters in the American capital has risen fast in recent weeks. If there has been any reason for the change in attitude, it may well be China’s not honoring its agreement, reached while President Xi Jinping was in Washington in September, to stop cyber attacks for commercial espionage purposes.

On Friday, Seoul’s Unification Ministry announced that North Korea had accepted the South’s invitation to hold a working-level meeting in the truce village of Panmunjom, in the Demilitarized Zone. The talks, scheduled for Thursday, are supposed to prepare the way for high-level discussions between the two Koreas, to be held in either Pyongyang or Seoul.

“It is our stance that freedom of navigation and freedom of flight should be ensured in this area, and that any conflicts be resolved according to relevant agreements and established international norms,”said South Korean Defense Minister Han Min-koo, referring to the South China Sea, in a recent news briefing with his American counterpart in Seoul.

The remark, made on the heels of a trilateral meeting in the South Korean capital among Premier Li Keqiang of China, President Park Geun-hye of South Korea, and President Shinzo Abe of Japan, was tentative. According to an account in the Wall Street Journal, “South Korean officials appeared eager to avoid the topic.”

Photographs posted on Chinese websites late last month suggest the People’s Liberation Army is now basing its J-11 fighters on Woody Island, the largest of the Paracels, a chain of islands near Vietnam and China in the middle portion of the South China Sea.

The PLA might not keep the advanced fighters there long—the salty air degrades sophisticated planes quickly—but the introduction of J-11s on that island will surely cause alarm in the contested region for many reasons.

On Tuesday, the USS Lassen, an Arleigh Burke–class guided-missile destroyer, conducted a freedom of navigation exercise around Subi and Mischief Reefs in the Spratly chain in the South China Sea. Beijing had been huffing and puffing before the much-anticipated event but carried through on none of its implied threats to harass the vessel as it made its “transit,” which took it within 12 nautical miles of the reefs that China has made into island bases.